Civil War-era cemetery seeks sponsors

Civil War recreationists from the Bradbur Camp give a four-rifle salute at the Bucktoe Creek Cemetery Saturday morning during a kick-off ceremoney for the “Stewards for a Stone” program. (Photo by Wm. Shawn Weigel)

KENNETT — The volunteers seeking to restore the Civil War-era Bucktoe Creek Cemetery are looking for more help.

Located at the former site of the New Garden Memorial UAME Church, the roughly 90 graves there include eight African American Civil War soldiers, as well as former church parishioners and members of the surrounding community.

New Garden Memorial UAME member Crystal Crampton, who has spearheaded much of the effort, said that the project has moved into a different phase as they now seek sponsors for actual headstones instead of grave markers.

Crampton said that in many cases, simple quartz stones were placed as indicators that someone was buried in a particular plot and nothing else, which makes identifying the cemetery’s occupants that much more difficult.

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Project restorationist Eugene Hough, of Radnor, has used everything from ground penetrating radar to dousing rods to outline the church foundation and locate the grave sites; identifying the occupants, however, is a completely different challenge.

“We don’t have a complete tapestry yet, and considering the age of the cemetery itself, there may be some additional burials that there’s not a record for,” Hough said.

In the case where the records do exist, Hough said, it’s a matter of locating and going through the physical records, which takes time.

“And we need people to help with that process,” he said.

When the project first began, in preparation for a Grand Review for African American Civil War soldiers in 2010, Hough worked from a photograph of the original UAME Church to help figure out how the cemetery might have looked.

“A lot of folks didn’t have money for expensive headstones,” he said.

Using students from Tower Hill school as volunteers, Hough located and roughly mapped out much of the cemetery on his own, using what records he could find and by a variety of methods on site.

Hough then used an existing gravestone to make a casting for the model of the ones that can be purchased through the “Stewards for a Stone” program, where groups or individuals can sponsor and be part of the restoration process, according to Crampton.

“Our vision for this cemetery is that every person out here has a headstone,” Crampton said.

Gwen Lacy, executive director of the non-profit Land Conservancy for Southern Chester County , said that the cemetery is an important part of an area that includes the region’s only single-lane bridge, as well as acres of conserved historic land.

“You cannot separate the land from its history,” Lacy said.

To learn more about the Bucktoe Creek Cemetery project, or to sponsor a headstone, visit www.tlcforscc.org.